Generating and managing distributed applications can be carried out via a platform, for example, such as the open source Docker™ platform. Such an example platform can include thousands of public container images in its image repository, wherein each image can be organized as a sequence of file system layers. However, a user of a container image from such a platform has no recourse but to trust the developer's name and description of the image for what the image contains. In using such existing platforms, verification prior to downloading the image is not currently possible.
Additionally, given an image with many applications and/or components installed (each in one or more layers), it is currently not possible to extract a select set of components to create a leaner modified image. In such an instance, a user would have to rebuild a new image from scratch with the required components. Also, applying a patch or update to a particular software component has to be implemented as a new layer, or the user would have to rebuild a new image from scratch.